Christmas is practically here, and I've been too busy directing to sit on the toilet and read Christmas catalogs. This makes it hard on Sweetie (the wife). Normally I have plenty of time to test the gadgets that she'd surely want to buy me. This year, I am directing three television pilots in addition to Pushing Daisies on ABC. Since these shows are being shot in Los Angeles, New York, and Vancouver, most of the items on my wish list are portable and will help make the next six months on the road more palatable.

I'd like to upgrade my first-generation flat panels with two new models. The Pioneer Elite KURO Pro-150FD ($7,500; seeingandhearing.com), above, is a fantastic-looking sixty-inch plasma. The picture is superb, and the unit itself looks like the black slab in 2001: A Space Odyssey lying on its side. Plasmas still have a slight advantage when you're viewing certain fast-moving sports, and the price difference between a sixty-inch plasma and LCD is huge. I also like the forty-six-inch Mitsubishi LT-46244 LCD HDTV ($4,499; mitsubishi-tv.com). The picture is brilliant, and it has a narrow frame. Since I'm playing the sound through my audio system, I'm less interested in speakers and more excited about maximizing cabinet space.

I prefer the programming on Sirius to XM satellite radio, and it's not because of Howard Stern. It's got the best sixties station, several different channels of NPR, and it broadcasts every NFL game, with the option of listening to either the home or away team's commentary. The Stiletto 2 ($350; shop.sirius.com) is a portable Sirius unit that not only gets its signal from satellite, but when you're indoors, it can connect to any wi-fi, meaning it gets Sirius Internet radio through the Web. It also allows you to record songs onto a flash drive as you listen to them and has the usual car brackets. This is a great unit.

Unless you really need to do the interchangeable-lens thing, I'm not a huge fan of most digital SLRs. A great alternative is this eight-megapixel Panasonic ($400; panasonic.com). The Leica lens is supersharp, and it has an enormous 18x optical zoom that starts at an excellently wide 28mm. It has features like face recognition, which finds faces and makes sure the camera focuses on them. This can be helpful for some -- my buddy Graham once took a picture of me and my idol, race-car driver Bobby Rahal, and managed to focus on neither of us but instead on the giant Wiener-schnitzel sign in the background.

This is a well-built titanium twelve-megapixel point-and-shoot ($450; usa.canon.com) with both optical and digital viewfinders. It is rare to find point-and-shoots with an optical finder anymore, which is sad because you need one for high-glare situations. If Chloe (the kid) convinces me to go skiing (I'm quite good on the greens), she can use the optical viewfinder to place me brilliantly in the middle of the frame, flat on my back.

This is a great idea, a twelve-by-sixteen-foot outdoor movie screen with a detachable motor to inflate it in about ten minutes ($5,595; outdoor-movies.com). With a projector like the -->, you've got a personal drive-in. This spring, when I'm finally back in East Hampton, New York, I'm going to set up the projector, smoke some ribs, sit in my pool, and screen a retrospective of my earlier work. Just be sure to stake it in windy environments.

One of the wonderful things about Sony's line of projectors is that they're really quiet. This one ($5,000; sonystyle.com) is also small enough that I can ship it to various locations and set up an ad-hoc screening room. For New Year's Eve, I'm going to send one to Telluride, Colorado, and try to project Dick Clark's face across the snow-covered acreage. The projector uses three SXRD chips to produce a sharp, contrasty image and, for the price, is the best consumer projector out there.

Recently I was on the set of Hackett, a pilot I'm directing starring Donal Logue. The cochairmen of Sony and the five executive producers were all on set, trying to get onto the same conference call. We overloaded the conference-call system and ended up sitting around my BlackBerry, Bluetoothing the call to the Parrot Minikit speaker ($80; parrot.com) for us all to hear. This battery-operated speaker can be clipped onto your car's visor, but I carry it around in my man purse to be used wherever. And yes, we were able to convince Fox to go with David Koechner for the role of Gary Stankwick.

Mini DV tapes are going the way of floppy disks. The (1) Sony HDR-CX7 ($1,300; sonystyle.com) is a good ergonomically designed HD camera that shoots video at 1080i and still images at an excellent six megs using memory sticks (up to eight gigs). You can even shoot still photos while you continue to record video. The (2) Canon HG10 ($1,099; usa.canon.com) records your video directly onto a forty-gig hard drive. The camera shoots at 1080i, has very good autofocus, and shoots three-meg stills. With either of these cameras, you could shoot video worthy of your own television show.

One of the smaller-ticket items that I think I'll be giving out as gifts this year is the USB-powered lamp ($20; boynq.com), a little gooseneck light that plugs in to your computer's USB port and illuminates your keyboard or whatever you aim it at. Boynq also makes an adorable fan ($20) that is also powered via USB port.

I originally wanted a Lamborghini because it is Chloe's favorite car -- she likes the way the doors scissor open. Having tested one, I can now tell you the Gallardo ($206,000; lamborghini.com) is also an incredible car to drive, plus it makes me look like a really rich hedge-fund guy instead of just a lowly movie director. It has regular doors, but goes zero to sixty in less than four seconds, has ten cylinders and 520 horsepower, and stops as if you're hitting a brick wall, which I almost did. The electric top is wonderful to watch. And it is the best sounding car I've ever driven. Come on, Sweetie, please, it will make Chloe so happy!

The ICM15S ($299; windchaserproducts.com) is a portable ice maker that creates three sizes of ice cubes that look like clear suppositories. I'm a big fan of drinking martinis at the end of a long day on the set, and sometimes it's hard to find an ice machine. With the WindChaser, just plug it in, add water, and in about eight minutes, you've got your first ice cubes. It's great for parties, temporary offices, and my trailer.

This is a cool idea for Chloe. You mount your iPod on the base station, and then it broadcasts the signal to battery-powered wireless speakers that can work up to 150 feet from the base station, along with the remote control. The lightweight speakers can be carried to your pool or your bathroom, then returned to the base station for charging, or you can leave them on the base station and use the Griffin as a regular boom box ($350; griffintechnology.com). In Chloe's case, she can leave the base station in her dorm room at boarding school (I miss her terribly) and take the speakers into the lounge to impress her new friends.

Now that the colder seasons are here, I've officially made the switch from vodka martinis to dry Rob Roys. The Macallan ($75) is really too good to drink any way but neat, but it is Christmas, so I'm going to use this incredibly smooth light-colored Scotch as the main ingredient in my Rob Roy (along with dry vermouth and a twist).

This little battery brick ($30; blackanddecker.com) powers and charges any device that can be powered from a USB cable or 110-volt socket, which is nice, since there's only so many hours of "Name That Tune" I can play in the scouting van before I become bored and start making endless calls and sending angry missives on my BlackBerry.

If your wife or girlfriend insists on buying you only one gift for Christmas, the Slingbox Pro ($230; slingmedia.com) is what you want. It connects to your cable or satellite box and your Internet and allows you to watch every channel on your home TV using your computer anywhere in the world that has a broadband connection. That means I'll be able to be in Vancouver and watch the New York Giants find new and creative ways to blow it. Not only can you watch live TV, you can watch and control your TiVo remotely. It's the best gadget I've tested this year.

The new Curve ($450; t-mobile.com) is now the best all-around BlackBerry. The keys are well spaced, it comes with a camera, and depending on the carrier, you can get it with either GPS or, in the case of T-Mobile, Wi-Fi, which lets you make calls using Wi-Fi networks. Add a T-Mobile router to your home broadband connection and you've created your own hot spot, and for a $20 monthly fee, you can make unlimited Wi-Fi calls.

I'm not that comfortable with being touched by anyone except Sweetie. As perfect as she is, massage is not one of her fortes. That's where the Panasonic ($4,799; panasonic.com) comes in. Not only does this chair give all sorts of strong massages, like shiatsu and Swedish, it also has air bladders and rollers that add another level of pressure on my overly tense body. A feature that I love is that it can massage and squeeze your legs and calves, and it can lock your arms in a strong embrace. I might put one of these in my camper on the TV pilots to keep me relaxed. I'd keep it on the set, but my moaning might be distracting.

Lyle Lovett and Toots and the Maytals recently released new albums, and Sweetie and I downloaded them from the Rhapsody Internet-music-subscription service (rhapsody.com). Since I liked them both, I transferred them to the incredibly small Sansa e280R MP3 player ($150). So long as I keep up my $15-a-month subscription, I can download any of the four million songs on Rhapsody without ever buying one. I thought it would be stupid to rent songs instead of owning them, but in reality, I'm listening to all sorts of great stuff that I never would have purchased from iTunes.

For me, espresso is all about the crema, the tan swirly head sitting on top. I've always had great results with Lavazza, and now with its new, more affordable Lavazza Blue ($379; cafe-razzi.com), I can keep a machine on set. It keeps me going, and when the crew gets dreary, I start handing out espressos to them, too. Sweetie feels the Lavazza's coffee is too bitter, and she resents the plastic pods' effect on the environment, but I love the espresso this machine makes.